Roorkee Chairs – Part 3

Our friends Brad and Pam bought a cabin in the mountains and the terrain is pretty crooked on their property. I thought that this was exact scenario Roorkee chairs were made for…and I wanted to make something for someone else; so I decided to make some chairs for Brad, Pam, Roger, and Suzie because they are always going camping or out to the cabin. I was also planning on donating a chair to Ohana, our annual charity event in Lake George. And who know, maybe I’ll build some patterns and sell them in the future.

To refresh your memory, there are the chairs I’ve made in the past:

I figured this would be a quick little project, so I headed to the wood store to get some wood in December of 2023. The closest thing they had to what I needed was called Sapele, so I picked up a couple of sticks.

I also wanted to make a tiki version for charity that would have carved legs and a tapa print; so I made an extra chair for a friend who could carve the legs and might enjoy making the tapa. He is a Witco aficionado, so I wanted to make a prototype version for him that I would use as a template for the charity auction chair(s). Witco used straight-grain cedar, so I managed to find some for his chair…that was wayyyy more expensive than the fancy Sapele.

Then I pulled out the lathe and started turning the legs:

Christmas came and went, so I put them all aside to work on later.

Ohana 2024 was coming up, so I started back up again in April 2024 and turned a bunch of octagons into the stretchers between legs:

This turned out to be a pain, so I figured there has to be a way to just copy one of them over and over again. It turns out you can get a lathe duplicator that will help make copies and I picked one up. However, it always cut one side a little smaller than the other and I gave up on it. After I finished ALL of the turning and was cleaning the lathe to put it away, I realized that an extension was mis-aligned and probably caused all the problems I had with the duplicator.

I then used my giant pencil sharpener to taper the ends of all the stretchers.

Ohana came and went, so I missed my window. I had a bunch of other projects to get to, so I put all of the wood in a box so I could work on them all later.

Christmas 2024 was coming soon, so I started the project up again and finished all the wood with Rubio Monocoat:

I was able to finish prototyping the canvas chair parts:

But Christmas was over, so I put the project on hold again for a couple of months.

Then I started working on the leather arms for the Tiki chair, and the straps for all the chairs, a couple of months later. Lina did all the leatherwork on the previous chairs, so this was all new to me and I was able to use her scraps to do this leatherwork:

Then I finished the prototype Tiki chair with white canvas and leather trim:

Then I made storage pouches and a travel bag for all the parts:

Then I gave it all to Grey to carve and finish the fabric if he wants to. These chairs were a pain in the butt, so there will be no more Tiki chairs for auction or sale.

More projects got in the way, but I was able to finally finish the chairs almost 2.5 years to the day I started this project: